code in chapter 2 downloads a bad zipfile

[mmagnuski]

Hi Cyrille,

In chapter 2 there is a code that downloads a facebook.zip file:

import urllib2, zipfile
url = 'http://ipython.rossant.net/'
filename = 'facebook.zip'

downloaded = urllib2.urlopen(url + filename)
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
    f.write(downloaded.read())

For some reason the code does not download a valid zip file. Running the next part of code gives BadZipFile error:

with zipfile.ZipFile(filename) as zip:
    zip.extractall('.')

the traceback:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
BadZipfile                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-10-091bb6db8a0d> in <module>()
----> 1 with zipfile.ZipFile(filename) as zip:
      2     zip.extractall('.')

D:\Python\Anaconda\lib\zipfile.pyc in __init__(self, file, mode, compression, allowZip64)
    768         try:
    769             if key == 'r':
--> 770                 self._RealGetContents()
    771             elif key == 'w':
    772                 # set the modified flag so central directory gets written

D:\Python\Anaconda\lib\zipfile.pyc in _RealGetContents(self)
    809             raise BadZipfile("File is not a zip file")
    810         if not endrec:
--> 811             raise BadZipfile, "File is not a zip file"
    812         if self.debug > 1:
    813             print endrec

BadZipfile: File is not a zip file

At least this is what happens on my windows 8 machine.
Downloading the file by hand (in Chorme) works well (no errors in the unzipping code).

I have a 64-bit windows and 32-bit python (psychopy does not work with 64-bit python):

Python 2.7.7 :: Anaconda 2.0.1 (32-bit)

Do you think this could be the source of this problem?

_{BTW: thanks for a great book! 👍 👍 👍}

[rossant]

Thanks for the report! Other people have had this problem too. It's a weird interaction between the OS, Python, and the server that stores this file... The code for downloading the file should be made more robust. In the meantime the simplest option is just to download the file from Chrome like you did! If you want to use IPython for that I would suggest to use something like !wget http//.... I think on Windows wget works in Powershell, otherwise you can use http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

[mmagnuski]

Good to know, thanks!